Archive for February 2014

Amy Goodman interviews investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald for their first interview upon launching The Intercept, their new digital magazine published by First Look Media, the newly formed media venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden’s disclosures on the National Security Agency. He was previously a columnist at The Guardian newspaper. Scahill is producer and writer of the documentary film “Dirty Wars,” which is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. “We are really about a journalistic ethos — which is not doing things like helping the U.S. continue its targeting of U.S. citizens for death, but by being adversarial to the government,” Greenwald says. “Telling the public what it ought to know, and targeting the most powerful corporate factions with accountability journalism.” Greenwald and Scahill founded TheIntercept.org with filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Also, you can hear Jeremy Scahill discuss their first major story – Death by Metadata, the method being used to target so-called terrorists in countries such as Yemen, essentially using the cell phone location, with no human intelligence confirmation.

I see The Intercept as an important step forward in the evolution of publicly visible journalism that is outside of the corporate-controlled mainstream, standing on the shoulders of the likes of Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.